John Davis

12 January 1921 – 13 July 1984 · Smithtown, New York

John Henry Davis was the dominant heavyweight Olympic weightlifter of the 1940s and early 1950s. He won six world championships between 1938 and 1952 and Olympic gold in London 1948 and Helsinki 1952. He was the second lifter on record to clean and jerk the original Apollon's Wheels, in Paris in 1949.

Origins

Davis was born in Smithtown, on Long Island, in January 1921 to an African-American family. He took up Olympic weightlifting in his early teens, won his first national junior title at fifteen, and was the world champion at seventeen — the youngest in the history of the lift. He joined Hoffman's York Barbell circle in his late teens and lived and trained in York through most of his competitive career.

The work

Davis dominated international heavyweight weightlifting from his first world title in 1938 (in Vienna, on the eve of the Anschluss) until his retirement in the mid-1950s. He won at the world championships in 1938, 1946, 1947, 1949, 1950, and 1951, took Olympic gold in London 1948 and Helsinki 1952, and held world records in all three Olympic lifts. He served in the U.S. Army during the Second World War.

His clean and jerk of Apollon's Wheels in Paris in 1949 was the second known successful lift of the implement after Rigoulot's in 1930 — a generational benchmark that Davis met as a serving Olympic champion rather than as a music-hall stage piece. He retired from competition after a 1956 injury.

Notable feats

• World weightlifting champion, 1938, 1946, 1947, 1949, 1950, 1951 (six titles).
• Olympic gold, heavyweight, London 1948.
• Olympic gold, heavyweight, Helsinki 1952.
• Clean and jerk of the original Apollon's Wheels, Paris, 1949 — the second known.
• Multiple world records in the press, snatch, and clean and jerk through the late 1940s and early 1950s.

Method

Davis trained under the York system of the 1940s, in an unusually large weekly volume by the standards of the period. He was a meticulous technician on the Olympic three lifts; he was also one of the first American lifters to use systematic squat training as a foundation for the clean. He left no training book; what survives of his method is in Strength & Health's coverage of his career.

Legacy

Davis is the most decorated American weightlifter of the immediate post-war period and one of the few American athletes whose dominance of an international sport spanned the Second World War. He is also the figure whose career most directly challenges the older racialised assumptions of mid-century American strength culture; Strength & Health's coverage of him through the 1940s and 1950s is part of the documentary record on this. He died in 1984 at sixty-three.

Disputed and unresolved

Davis's exact best lifts are well-documented in IWF records; the figures are not contested. The circumstances of his post-retirement health and the injury that ended his career are documented in Fair's Muscletown USA.